Enterprise Software Steals the Show at TechCrunch50

I’m over at TechCrunch50, where the morning was slow and buggy but things just livened up fantastically with, believe it or not, the enterprise software panel. Seriously, it was awesome. As judges, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff and Yossi Vardi were not only incisive but absolutely hilarious. And the presenting companies looked good.

“It’s amazing how a conference can turn on a dime,” said Kent Goldman, principal at First Round Capital, sitting next to me in the second row. With no Wi-Fi, slow pacing, and glitches galore, the only highlight this morning was Ashton Kutcher and his new web show “Blah Girls.” But that all changed this afternoon when Andreessen jokingly demanded from the judges table a “very, very dirty” vodka martini.

Here are the enterprise software picks:

– FairSoftware helps developers setting up a project together split up shares without hiring lawyers and making a C corp. Benioff said there was a big need for this, that he would love it on his platform. Vardi, Israel’s best-known tech investor, jokingly stressed out about what cutting out lawyers would mean for Jews.

– Yammer is Twitter, feature-for-feature, for companies. The judges absolutely loved this, but I couldn’t get past how much of a ripoff it was. It’s made by the same people who do the family tree site Geni. Benioff said he wanted to invest.

– Blueprint helps developers design software for multicore CPUs. Andreessen said he liked this but worried it would be at its best for easy problems.

– OpenTrace, which gives every product a barcode and traces it through the supply chain to dynamically calculate its environmental load, seemed very cool. I’d love to see more of how it works; we’ll get the folks at Earth2Tech to check it out further.